Media
commentator SAM LIPSKI (pictured) reviews the
videotape by British historian David Irving, released for
public meetings after his visit was banned, Many of the
meetings were cancelled on Wednesday night, under threat of
protest

DAVID
Irving stands in front of a potted palm and for 80 minutes
harangues the single camera on the 'Holocaust legend", the
"Auschwitz myth" and his "traditional enemies" in the
international Jewish organisations.

There is
something chilling and yet absurd about this man. On jumpy
video, this is a performance which meanders between bombast
and boredom. In short bursts on television current affairs
programs, Irving comes over as clever and loaded with
information, however distorted and selectively
deployed.

But on
The
Search for The Truth In History
-- the pompously mendacious title of this relentlessly
egoistic home video -- his insidiously delivered message is
too long, too rambling and too fanatical.

May 21, 1993

The language
purports to be that of the disinterested historian and
dedicated archivist, and at times it is.

But then come
the lapses and give-aways. "The Jews have dined out on the
Holocaust for too long ... I'm not an anti-Semite but if I
ever become one it will be their fault ... the Holocaust
legend (has been kept alive) by a long chain of gullible
people."

It is
difficult to see this shabby exercise in self-promotion,
disguised as a self-less crusade for free speech, becoming a
box office success on the country pub circuit, the
occasional Mechanics Hall or wherever else the promoters can
now book a venue. Surely the numbing effect of the Irving
rave for nearly an hour and a half, with no pic-torial
relief from his talking head, will be too strong.

Yet those who
have experienced Nazism and other forms of totalitarianism
will argue that such a relaxed analysis of the Irving tape
underestimates the insidious power of the big lie to capture
the minds of otherwise rational citizens and to incite the
less than rational to violence.

That is a
compelling argument and it is precisely why I supported the
Government's decision to ban Irving. The video, however, as
it stands, is in a different category than the man himself
on a lecture tour.

But the views
on the video are certainly the same as they have been, with
increasing outlandishness and outrageousness over recent
years. Here the first hour of Irving's speech is taken up
with a potted history of his various appearances in courts
in half a dozen countries and his disagreements with other
historians whom he attacks as "a gang of liars... and
cowards"

All the
opposition to him he blames on the international
Jewish-Zionist conspiracy to keep the world from learning
"the truth". The truth, according to Irving. is not that the
Holocaust is a lie but that it is "a legend". There were no
gas chambers at Auschwitz,
and at most 100,000 Jews died there of epidemics and
possibly limited killings rather than the minimum of 1
million victims that the Nazis themselves
acknowledged.

Basing much
of his argument on the forensic "findings" of
Fred
Leuchter,
a discredited American revisionist whom the British Home
Secretary banned in 1991, Irving dismisses the thousands of
surviving eye-witnesses to the Auschwitz extermination
machine. They are all, without exception, suffering from a
mass delusional state, Irving explains, or else they have
seen too many television mini-series.

As for the
question of the millions of missing Jews. Irving offers the
truly prepos-terous suggestion, even for him, that the Royal
Air Force probably killed them when it bombed
Dresden
and other German cities where, according to Irving, who
knows how many Jews had ended up in the middle of World War
II as refugees who had somehow been able to wander away from
the Nazi death camps. Even the Nazis themselves did not come
up with that one at Nuremberg.

[As
others have pointed
out,
Lipski's summary of the video is grossly dishonest and
distorted. Mr Irving himself wrote a Reader's Letter to
The Australian, suggesting that it would have been more
honest if Mr Lipski had identified himself to readers as
editor of the Australian Jewish News, rather than as a
mere "media commentator".]